SmartClassroom :: Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Case Study

"Have you ever found yourself standing in front of your class in the middle of a lecture and wondering what in the world is going on in the minds of your students?"
--Douglas Duncan, University of Colorado, from the book, Clickers in the Classroom

By Linda L. Briggs

Any instructor who has had the experience Duncan describes can appreciate the idea of using clickers, or personal response devices, to gauge student participation and understanding. At the University of Delaware, with nearly 20,000 students, clickers are not only engaging students during class, they're starting to be used for homework assignments and as campus-wide polling devices....

News & Product Updates

Whatever else your students are doing on the Internet, they are using it for educational purposes as well. According to a study released last week by Houghton Mifflin, more than half of college students use the Internet "to keep up with course work and prepare for exams."...

Blackboard this week debuted a new tool called SafeAssign, which is designed to eliminate plagiarism in student assignments. The service detects plagiarized works in student papers and delivers reports on such incidents through the Blackboard Learning System....

According to a forecast released last week by display market research firm Pacific Media Associates, the market for pocket projectors and other miniature projection devices is set for a very bright future, though the devices themselves typically offer fewer than 500 lumens of brightness....